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I had my first radio interview last week on a local station, KOOP 91.7 FM, on a show called Writing on the Air.

These are some of my reflections:

My wife listened to the interview that evening while I walked Logan. When I came back, she told me, with a big smile on her face, that she really enjoyed it. I haven’t listened to it, but I have considered how I would have answered the questions better or expanded on certain things. Then again, I’m a writer, not a speaker.

Tim Ferriss posted on Twitter:
”It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.”

So, this is my way of focusing on my strengths rather than trying to fix my weaknesses. My spoken English is not perfect, and I’m learning that having a few minutes to talk about broad topics is probably not my ideal setting. It takes my overly analytical, overthinking brain some time to gather my ideas and speak them coherently. Still, it was a good experience that I’m eager to repeat.

These are some of the questions I remember and how I would answer them if it were a written interview:

1) What would you tell someone who wants to become a writer?

I said: “Tell the truth.”

This is a fine answer, but without context, it feels incomplete. I meant to say that first, you must choose what kind of writer you want to be. Is your aim to be an overnight sensation and sell as many books as possible? If the answer is yes, you should take courses on outlining and closely watching market analytics. You should write to market and carefully craft a product that sells. Nothing wrong with that.

But, if you aim to become an artist, a writer of novels that stand the test of time, then telling the truth is the only way. Even in fiction, the soul of the story is truth. The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that in fiction, the truth is dressed in fantasy or fantastical events. It’s imaginary people carrying out real settings and having real conversations. The best books in history are ones that don’t shy away from certain truths that the author saw coming from a mile away. 1984, Farehtheit 451, Brave New World, etc., are books ahead of their time by authors brave enough to tell the truth, at whatever the cost. As artists, our job is not to be nice, to pander to the crowd, or to be liked. Our job is to tell the truth.

How you measure success is important.

2) What is the 444 series about?

I said: “About four archangels trapped in our universe and looking for a way out.”

I would add that it’s about four archangels trapped in our universe that are taking extreme and, sometimes, deadly measures to get out and overtake the Ancestor’s throne. At a high level, it’s a race to power, with whatever means necessary. Of course, there is a lot more to the series. I didn’t even mention the main characters. You will have to read it to find out how it unfolds.

3) What is the hardest part about selling my books?

I said: “Since I don’t write to market, the hardest part is explaining my books.”

This is correct. The more complete answer would be simply: “Marketing.”

Whenever I hear or think about that word, I think of the great authors in history. I imagine J. D. Salinger setting up a booth and chatting up potential readers at an event or Hemingway gathering meme pictures for a social media post. It’s a somewhat ridiculous scenario, but this is where we’re at. Would they thrive today if any of them were starting out right now? That’s an interesting question.

My difficulties in selling my books are the same difficulties most authors face: there’s just too much stuff out there competing for people’s attention. Some authors believe it’s just a matter of numbers. The more books they have out, the more chances they have of being discovered and the more books they’ll sell. So there’s an army of people who are pumping out books as if they were story factories. On the popularity front, I find it impossible to compete with these people, so I have to out-compete them with quality.

This means that it takes me about six months to a year to complete the first draft of a novel. Then comes editing, cover designing, re-writing, etc. By the time I release it, I end up with a quality story that gets lost in the soup of word vomit that is the publishing world.

Not only that, but books are pumped out with such speed, such carelessness that the reader has gotten used to a certain type of story. I have read a few modern books lately, all of them with an increasingly easier vocabulary and sentences that are so close to nonfiction books that I often wonder what happened to prose and subtlety. Lately, it feels more like I’m reading a blockbuster movie or a comic book than a novel. It’s fine for entertainment value, but as soon as I read the final page, the book exits my brain as fast as it entered it. I’m left the same as I was before I read it. Unchanged. I don’t know what that means for the literary world or my books. It comes back to the question of what kind of author you want to be. Sometimes, the best you can do is hop off the machine, watch it from afar, and enjoy the calmness of solid ground. I’ll write the best books I can write, each one a snapshot of my journey. Eventually, someone will notice.

4) Do you outline your books?

I said: “No.”

I trust my subconscious to come up with better symbolism and themes than my conscious mind ever could. So, I try to abstain from any deep planning of my stories. I do flesh out ideas before I start writing, and I’ll often leave little notes when I finish my writing session so that the next day, I can come to it knowing what needs to happen next in broader terms. I leave enough room for tangents, knowing that if I sleep well, my brain will take the story in a completely different direction. That’s what happened in Messengers Rising, where my brain came up with the idea for Istahar’s back story out of nowhere. That wasn’t planned at all, and it’s my favorite part of that book.

Writing is playtime for me. If I were to worry about the plot, beats, archetypes, and the hero’s journey at a conscious level, it would become a job, a chore. I would be like a creative chef with an idea for a dish who ended up flipping burgers at a fast food restaurant because someone told him those two spices could never go together.

When I used to make music, I knew the basic chords of a guitar, but everything else was made up on the spot. I didn’t know what any of the notes and chords were called, and I didn’t care. It sounded cool, aggressive, beautiful, calming, or whatever emotion I had at the moment. I had been playing make-believe all my life and enjoyed it. I want to continue creating in the same fashion. I might sometimes know the beginning and the ending, but everything in between is a mystery to be uncovered.

5) what is your writing routine?

I said: “Write first thing in the morning before the day gets away from you.”

Yes, but also: I sit in the same chair next to a window because sunlight puts me in a good mood, and I listen to the same instrumental music because lyrics are distracting. I use noise-canceling headphones because my neighbors have the loudest car in the world. And I stay there for two to three hours and give myself a good writing opportunity. Whatever happens, happens. Sometimes that means one sentence, other times multiple chapters.

I write before checking my emails and before logging on to social media. I need my brain fresh and uncorrupted by current events. I sometimes turn off my phone, watch, and any device with notifications. The only things I might do before writing are eating a protein and fat-rich breakfast, feeding and walking my dog, exercising, and drinking green tea because I found coffee puts me in a weird manic state where I’m too jittery and often leads to bad decisions. Clarity is paramount.

Sometimes, I might journal right when I get out of bed. As mentioned in The Artist’s Way, morning pages are a great way to silence the monkey brain.

That’s it for now. If I remember more questions, I’ll add them here.

If you like what you read and would like to support me, you can purchase my books at books.relvingonzalez.com or by clicking the Shop link on my website.

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If you are reading this article, you are proving my point, though I will not sell you anything, or teach you how to sell, not in the conventional way. There is an infinite amount of resources for that already. And they are effective. Well, it depends on how you measure it, anyway.

Stop to think

We never really stop to think about what we are really doing. And fare enough, we have bills to pay and mouths to feed. And after a few months of trying things out the “right” way, that is to say, full of integrity and trying to provide as much value as possible, we start hearing the creepy calls of the dark side. We start noticing a trend in our sales reports: they all look like a box of donuts, big black zeroes with blinding gaping holes. And we shift from creating so much value that people will eventually find us, to transforming into a marketing or ads expert, trying to make ourselves discoverable to the mechanical claws of the algorithm. We dismiss improving our craft, and try our luck exchanging our time at the marketing school slot machines. Our products, blogs, YouTube channel, and even artistic prowess suffer the negligence of our focus, as our virtual door to door salesman skills increase. The once amusing twitter threads about sales that demand your urgency become your daily dose of essential vitamins. You, too, begin creating sales that will end in 5 hours … 2 hours… 1 more left…

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“Urgency and scarcity tactics can be useful for increasing your store’s sales. When your store uses scarcity, your customer perceives that there’s a limited supply of goods, which compels them to purchase the product.”

— Nicole Martins Ferreira, oberlo

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An article titled “THE BEST URGENCY AND SCARCITY TACTICS TO INCREASE YOUR SALES”. All caps.

And who can argue with new greens entering your bank account? If money is not an appropriate measure of success, what is? When we start, we believe, truly, that only the corrupt can run a business prioritizing money instead of quality, and then we find ourselves as rich and as corrupt, and we understand how this could happen to anyone.

It takes but a matter of months for the right time to create your own flavor of the course ice cream. Imagine the internet as a series of buildings, with different meetings happening within. You enter one of the buildings, a seller’s meeting. “Passive income is the way,” you chant along with the league of shadows. At the end of such gathering, they pass packets of empty scoops around, one for each attendee, and the leader sends you out into the wild. “Remember, never take off the mask,” he says. It’s not a pyramid scheme, by the way, those died a long time ago. But if you bring people in, they will like you more. Maybe you’ll receive a 3D holographic invitation to the raddest club in town.

Come, I’ll teach you how to confuse – I mean convert

So you should convert people into customers. All hail the magic number of conversion rate. When you are looking for a specific item to purchase, you may see a line of booths selling the exact same thing, but one booth calls you in. It speaks to you in an ancient language that you have never heard, but still you understand it with deep intensity. Most of the time you can’t really tell why. If you are not yet aware, it has been figured out. Specific color combinations, expert copywriting, charging you triple the amount for the same product, value perception. It is a science, the Consumer Psychology they call it.

Honesty in buying

You’ll do anything to avoid buyer’s remorse, or worse being embarrassed that you were scammed into something. But don’t worry, that is why humans created Choice-supportive bias or post-purchase rationalization to convince ourselves that what we spent our money, AKA our time, on was exactly the right choice, just because. We tell ourselves there was no way the situation could have gone any other way. I have family members who have thrown thousands of dollars down the drain, have been duped and scammed out of their noses, and burned by companies, yet still go back to said companies with rationalizations such as “Oh, they messed up as humans but their product is good,” or, “I just got a bad batch.” There are a lot of reasons to lie awake at night, and this might just be one of them. It is wise to always be brutally honest with yourself and practice sitting alone for a long time in the face of discomfort. That is when and where your true thoughts are allowed to emerge.

The risks that accrue to you for speaking the truth are so much more minimal than the risks that accrue to you from deceiving yourself and other people that they’re not even in the same universe…speak the truth!

Jordan Peterson

Moths to a bright light

And what about that little voice, gut feeling or whatever you want to call it, when you sense something about a person? Maybe it is an influencer, a creator, a YouTuber, someone that is inserting thoughts through your headphones, your ear canal, and straight into your brain. There is something about their body language, about how they speak, that you feel you shouldn’t trust. Still, if their skills as a salesman are advanced enough, you will be compelled to throw money their way, and feel gross about it during every step of the checkout process.

Honesty in selling

I, and probably you, have bought products from great sellers, and from not so great sellers. That is, people who are, or not, great at selling their products. But by far, my favorite way to purchase a product is from a person that gives away so much of himself, and shares so much value, that I go out of my way to search for his products and buy them. In a way, you become a mini shark in a made up version of shark tank, and you invest in the person, and not merely on a no-face shiny product. These buying experiences are not only fulfilling, and joy inducing, they also leave a great, non GMO, all natural aftertaste, as opposed to the artificial, over produced, compounded taste, and you will not only become a return customer, but you will find yourself talking about the product incessantly. You become a street marketer for a person, at no cost to them. But this can only happen as an accidental effect from the deep obsession on their part with whatever skill they have, and a page or paragraph with “their story” written by a copywriter does not have the same effect.

Lessons learned from the village elders

I recently discovered a woodworker that builds all of his projects by hand. That is, by using hand tools. He is an older gentleman, and he has a lot of videos spanning back a decade. If you were to squish all of the videos together and put them in a sack, you would have a bag as heavy as gold. This person completely put himself and all of his knowledge out there, for free. And this is a well renowned person in his craft, with clients of the highest ranks in various industries around the world. He could probably sell you anything, but chooses not to. In his blog, you find articles that are not perfect or pristine, with countless orthographic errors, but are still a joy to read because his knowledge and passion ooze all over his writing. You can almost feel his desire to share and teach. And you feel compelled to support him in any way that you possibly can. He makes it very hard for you to give him your money, still you try even harder. You subscribe to his YouTube, use the links on his website, follow his advice, and all because you truly believe it when he says “This should be free for everyone.”

Conclusion

You can buy all the courses of the world, and become a master seller, and take a shot of tequila every time your bank account goes up, and fall asleep drunk with your mouse on the refresh button. You can convince yourself it is the stamp of a successful person. The comfortable cushions of your sports car reiterate it, and so does the expensive food, and the empty hugs from people you call friends, who think they can become just as rich by osmosis. But as I continue growing and learning, I have to conclude that the best sellers in the world are the ones that don’t try to sell me anything at all. The ones that are so incredible at what they do, dedicated themselves so much to a thing that their value can scarcely be contained within the barriers of their skin. And the joy they have in what they do goes beyond what can be measured by physical objects. The joy sticks to you like strawberry marmalade on a new white shirt. You feel good not only buying from them, but finding on your own the way to transfer your money, AKA time, to them. At this point it stops being a relationship of buyers and sellers, but a relationship of time transferrers. Exchanging bits of life between one another. Paying for something thus becomes a statement of gratitude. A way to say, “Thank you for existing”. And what is a better measure than that?

Do you want to become a great seller? Become the best at something, instead.

Start by fixing your evening and morning routines.

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